Events

The Centre for Policy Research (CPR) and Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH) invite you to a workshop on:

Amaravati and India’s Urban Future

Tuesday, 30th June 2026, 3:45 PM IST

Speaker:

Speaker:
Carol Upadhya, Social Anthropologist, Honorary Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bengaluru, India

This event will be held online via Zoom. Kindly register below to attend.

Register to attend via Zoom

About the Talk
The talk will provide an overview of Carol Upadhya’s new book, Urbanizing the Future: A New City Project in Agrarian South India (Berghahn Books, 2026; e-book downloadable at: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/UpadhyaUrbanizing).

Based on over ten years of field research on the Amaravati capital city project in Andhra Pradesh (2014 to 2025), the book traces the planning, execution, abandonment and subsequent resurrection of the ambitious plan to build a hyper-modern ‘greenfield city’ in a populated agrarian landscape. Focusing on the responses of local communities, the talk will explore why most landowning households agreed to surrender their land for this mega-project. The discussion will trace the social consequences of the project for different caste and class groups living in the 29 villages encompassed by the master plan, highlighting the disruptions and conflicts that erupted as agricultural land was converted into urban real estate via the land pooling scheme. Through the story of Amaravati, the talk will pose larger questions about India’s current infrastructure- and urbanization-focused development trajectory, the entanglements of urban planning with speculative real estate markets, and policy models that hinge on the assetization of land.

About the Speaker
Carol Upadhya, a social anthropologist, is Honorary Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, India, where she heads the Urban and Mobility Studies Programme. Upadhya’s latest publication is an ethnography of the imagination and development of Amaravati, a greenfield city project in Andhra Pradesh, titled Urbanizing the Future: A New City Project in Agrarian South India (Berghahn Books, 2026). She is co-editor of a collaborative volume on Bengaluru’s transformations, Chronicles of a Global City: Speculative Lives and Unsettled Futures in Bengaluru (with Vinay Gidwani and Michael Goldman; University of Minnesota Press, 2024; Yoda Press, 2025).

Upadhya is also the author of Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy (Oxford University Press, 2016). She has published in journals such as Third World Quarterly, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, Urbanisation, Economy and Society, Contemporary South Asia, and Economic and Political Weekly and co-edits the Journal of South Asian Development (SAGE).